Opposable Thumbs —

Valve launches Steam Community, perhaps a bit soon

The new PC writer tries to test out Steam's new community features, with very …

Hey guys, Ben here. I recently received an e-mail from a long-time reader, who very politely told me he found our PC coverage a little light. Fair enough. He also offered a solution: he'd be more than willing to tackle some reviews and PC news. "I don't even own a console," he warned me. Perfect, I thought. A diehard PC gamer. This is his first post, and while we add him to the system, you may see more of his posts under my name, but we'll be sure to make it clear who actually wrote it. I have high hopes for our new PC Guy (as he has become known around the office), Johnathan Neuls. Let's give him a warm welcome.

Steam has launched the open beta of the community section of their service, although so far what I've found isn't terribly impressive.If you’re feeling saucy, try it out: just click on Settings from within Steam and activate the Steam Community beta in the "Beta Participation" section of the "Account" tab. The Steam Community is an ambitious new set of features added to the Steam client, things like a global friends list, voice chat, chat rooms, game lobbies, and some pseudo-social networking features like rudimentary profiles and user groups.As a plus, several of the features like messaging, your friend list, and voice chat are all slated to be available in and out of game.

The first thing you'll notice after activating the beta are a few UI alterations, most notably a fifth tab added to the main tabs at the top, labeled "Community."There is also a Friends button on the bottom row with a big red "new" on it.My first inclination, as with any site, is to customize my profile.The user profiles are very simple.Name, avatar, favorite website, favorite game… that sort of thing.No substitute for other fully-featured social networking sites, but that clearly isn't the intention here.Here is an example of what the profile should look like when finished.

Sadly, the avatar uploading process was, by far, the most solid part of my experience with the beta so far.There are three sizes of avatar that several Community features use: the largest is a 184px square JPG or PNG, with two others at 64 and 32px.I was pleased to see that when I uploaded my 184x184 avatar to my profile it automatically resized the file for the other two smaller avatars without any user interaction.

The big feature that I was personally excited about was pulling up the Steam client—and its new Community functions—from within a game.While this feature did not seem to affect any of the games from launch, as soon as I tried to access the Steam client in-game it hall-of-mirror’d on me and I had to kill my laptop.Very disappointing, since this is one of the features required for Valve to really make the Community system work. I tried this over and over, and it continued to crash my system.

As I have often found on the Steam website, the profiles and other community features I viewed that were not a local part of the client were very sluggish.

This would appear to be Valve’s answer to Xbox live's feature set and, while it does appear to have all the bases covered, the bases are unstable and may explode at any moment.Then again, if you recall, Steam itself wasn’t very stable when it first launched, either, and Valve has managed to grow it into one of the most prolific digital distribution mechanisms for the PC platform.The Steam Community beta is just that… a beta, and a brand new, unpatched beta at that.I’m really hoping Valve pulls the project together soon.